Death, Psyche, and Evil

There is an intrinsic relationship between the fear of mortality, our invention of the sacred, and the nightmarish history of human violence. The apprehension that we cease to exist has spawned myriad visions of afterlives, paradises, reincarnation, and divine transcendence of the flesh. Death has been denied, forgotten, and transformed from fear, despair, and horror into joyous mirages and dreams of soothing repose. Disintegration of the body, the loathing of decay, putrefaction, and defeat by death have been transmuted into divine beatification and cathartic triumph. Death has been a seduction, an erotic longing for oblivion, rebirth, and merger with God, even a satiating absorption of fear into sadistic violence.

There is no paucity of research on what people believe about death. Yet, there is a dearth of psychological study that illumines the immense intricacies of our unconscious fantasies of death and the impact of unconscious dread on our propensities for war, atrocity, and extermination of evil. We may read countless explanations of what sacred doctrine or perverse terrorist misreading inspires some to imagine that apocalyptic martyrdom leads to Paradise, but barely any psychological adumbrations of why someone might feel that he must kill and die to be loved.

We still require deeper explanations for why death can be purification, rebirth, or orgasm. It is not enough to speak literally of death, purity, or evil. When Hindus purify themselves in the fetid waters of the Ganges, one of the most polluted rivers in the world, we must understand that the act is not literal cleansing. Nor is liberation from the corpse when consumed by fire. In this case, the living body in all its functions is an impure prison of the soul, and the holocaust is release

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from the cycles of birth and death. We must understand too, that the contamination of a corpse in ancient Judaism is not a realistic fear of disease. One who fails to purify himself in the proper ashes “shall be cut off from Israel” and from God (Numbers 19:13). In The Savage in Judaism, Rabbi Howard Eilberg-Schwartz demonstrates that in the Tanach a woman’s fluids, even those in birth, are also contamination and death. Yet the circumcision of the male child purifies with blood; male menstrual blood reverses the contamination of death.

Death is still treated as though it were one specific, identifiable thing people all understand, while believing different things about it. Death is far more than it seems. To genuinely understand our attitudes toward death we must exhume what has been buried, and what we may not want to know about death. It pervades our most sacred and passionate beliefs, and compels our most sinister behavior. We must therefore dissect the fantasy, imagery, poetry, delusion, and action that embody, dissolve, transform, displace, and occlude our thoughts on death. For we may envision death not only as the end of life, but as punishment, mutilation, catastrophe, aloneness, or alienation. Also, death may be dreamt even as sleep, rest, love, embrace, the womb, rapture, purification, or vengeance.

Culture, accident, and experiences form our profoundly disparate associations, feelings, and convictions about death. What leads us to stoicism and acceptance? What wracks us with fear and loathing, gestates existential misery, turns us to religion, or leads us to apocalyptic atrocities? Why does one culture envision death as undying darkness, while another sees death as a gossamer dream. A culture may conceive death as resurrection of a divine body, and yet another may divine murder in the name of God as the gateway to paradise. The terror and trauma of a plague, cataclysm, or war may be relived in images and obsessions unconsciously gripping the psyche, unconsciously reenacted and re-inflicted to exorcise and extinguish death. Individuals within a culture may distill their own unique experiences into artistic or aberrant conceptions of death. One person may be ensconced within the cultural vision; another may transcend the confines of such conception, reach an epiphany, and depict death in innovatively creative ways. Alternatively, one may hasten death in the formation of a suicidal cult, seek to catalyze the apocalypse by dispersing and orchestrating death, or become madly obsessed with extinguishing evil. A writer may compose an epic poem that awakens others to a new shape of death, a religious reader may reinterpret sacred texts to sanctify infliction of death, or a government may institute policies that murder innocents under the auspices of piety, charity, democracy, and peace.

Death weds the sacred and our fantasies of evil. Salvation and resurrection depend upon moral demands, demarcation of good and evil, the acts and piety that divide infernal Hell from heavenly bliss. Ritual and taboo are intended to ward off evil. They establish the sacred ways of controlling, cleansing, abjuring, and warding off contagion, wickedness, danger, defilement, catastrophe, and death.

The terror of catastrophe breeds stratagems designed to isolate and defer the calamitous danger that may so easily erupt. Death is so utterly terrifying that its causes are hallucinated: a mere ray of sunlight upon the king, a misplaced petal that doesn’t protect his foot from the ground, a toenail clipped at inauspicious times, the bowels relieved on impure days. A boy may die if he encounters his menstruating sister. A flood or plague may descend on a city if a woman cuts her hair on the wrong day. The causes are often imagined, sometimes approaching the symbolism and unreality of phobias and paranoia.

People then grasp at delusional means of magical control, supplication, piety, and purity. These traditional remedies, primitive science, or reasonable speculations have their foundation in terror and fantasy. Communities invent rituals that become sacred because they banish evil and death. There is an infinite repertory of apprehensive maneuvers desperately striving to avert disaster. Youths, or a goat, may be chosen to contain the defilement and evil, which is then expelled from the city. An animal may be sacrificed, while the knife is declared guilty. There are numerous, diverse rituals practiced to prevent death from raining plague, vengeance, or cataclysm.

Evil is not always a religious concept. Yet, the rationale of a moral or ostensibly secular ethi-

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cal system may be permeated by fantasy and functionally sacred means of control and aversion. Evil denotes innate badness and remorseless malice. When the word “evil” is invoked, the other becomes a repository of vile intentions, not merely one adhering to a different value system, but one without humanity or compassion not as fully human and caring as oneself. The other is not a person whose beliefs are merely incorrect or ignorant, but a malign nonhuman force clamoring for death. When evil is spoken as a metaphor, the attribution of malice and hostile intent may be more diaphanous, but when invoked as innate wickedness, a theological dimension splits good and evil into rigid categories that sanctify the pure self and demonize the other who may be justly slaughtered. One kills to eradicate evil, and need feel no sadness or remorse. As a metaphor, evil is evocative. We can use the word to imagine visions of the Devil, Hell, fire and brimstone, ghosts, vampires, Claggarts, and Iagos. The metaphor can be rich, a profound evocation of our feelings and fantasies that we may consciously explore.

The linguistic machination is also psychological. Marking another as evil provides a mythic justification, the magical sound that enables people to numb their empathy toward those who deserve to die. The relegation of humanity to evil is also a psychological process, the sequestration of vile qualities from the self. The acute splitting of categorical good from evil seeks to isolate evil from the physical self. One splits malice, rage, destructiveness—all evil aspects from the conscious sense of self—and displaces them onto or into the other. One needs the other to be the visage of evil and to siphon and infuse evil elsewhere. Evil is not only drained from the self, but from one’s community and God. These too must be purified, cleansed of all malicious qualities, and instilled with loving beatitude. God isn’t allowed to sin, must love us; he is who we invent to declare us good, beloved, righteous, and divinely sanctioned to blight our enemies. This cannot be the rule. Not everyone perceives evil in starkly black and white terms. Not everyone is arrested in paranoid-schizoid hallucination, thrives on vengeance, or yearns for violent outlets. Here, then, is a psychology of evil, for it is terror that compels unquestionable worldviews, flight from ambiguity and unknowing, consolidation of rigid strata of good and evil, and enemies that can be killed to eradicate the relentless threat.

The terror may derive from psychic representations, the internal presences of others digested from infancy onward, and intrapsychic entities that are as ghosts and demons that plague one with fear, horror, rage, and self-loathing. These ghosts torment the psyche but may easily become the conscious ego, the sense of identity and desire. One may be scarred so profoundly that one cannot but experience the world as wicked, malignant, and persecutory. One may align oneself with the rage and self-loathing, and thereby inflict it on others to please one’s ghosts, purify the self, and murder evil in the other. One can simultaneously seek to murder one’s evil ghosts, and one’s wicked God— the evil residue of the purified god––by killing the enemy.

There are genuinely threatening, malicious people in the world, but evil is almost always a hallucination, projection, and transference, the displacement of archaic injuries, objects, conflicts, and torment unknowingly experienced in the present as a real and external menace. There is for some a compulsion to repeat the process of splitting evil from internal presences that ghost the psyche, to then find an enemy who becomes the repository of evil, and can then be killed. The repetition may never be satisfied because no violence will ever un-haunt the psyche of its odious ghosts. One may never silence the echoes of self-loathing, or satisfy the voices that demand one’s own death, no matter how repeatedly one seeks to please the voices with murder of the self in the other.

One can be spontaneously terrified into violence by reacting to a threat or a fearsome idea. Many people can be manipulated instantly and regressed to paranoid terror where the enemy is raging for one’s death and must be quickly destroyed. History is rife with unspeakable and uncontainable violence erupting when communities are threatened by the fantasy of an enemy. A culture may magnify a tiny, benign minority into a homicidal threat that must be murdered to raze evil, or a leader feigning peace and piety may beguile a people with mendacious words of terror, seducing and soothing us with promises to root out and vanquish evil. Our own terror stupefies reason: it scares us away from consciousness, perception, and aware-

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ness. We regress and we thus become naïve and seducible by the most horrendous violence.

Death is not merely one static fact we all comprehend, but the most elusive and intricate of symbols, a physical reality that is vastly altered and suffused with fantasy and imagination, denied and evaded in countless ways, and finally, indelibly fused to our experiences of self, the body, the divine, and our most sadistic acts of slaughter. We must illuminate the mortal terrors that send us hurtling into sacred visions and doctrines of salvation, delirious and sacred denials of death, hateful apprehensions and delusions of inhuman enemies, as well as acts of malice and slaughter.

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